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Announcement

* Please make sure you join Piazza, we will use it for discussions and other information related to this class.

Course Description

Theme: The growing popularity of wireless-enabled mobile devices, such as laptop and palmtop computers, has necessitated extensive research, development, and deployment of wireless communication protocols. Communication over the wireless medium has fundamentally different properties than that over a wired medium, including higher error rates, lower bandwidths, nonuniform transmission characteristics, increased usage costs, increased susceptibility to interference and eavesdropping, and higher variability of performance. Similarly, mobile nodes behave differently and have fundamentally different limitations than stationary nodes. For example, mobile nodes generally operate on limited battery power and may move and change their point of connection to the network. This course will examine the area of mobile and wireless networking, looking at the unique challenges and opportunities presented by wireless communication and host or router mobility to design of networks, systems, and applications.

Contents: The course will commence with a short retrospective of wireless communication and initially touch on some of the fundamental physical layer properties of various wireless communication technologies. The focus will then shift to design of media access control and routing layers for various wireless systems. The course will also examine adaptations necessary at transport and higher layers to cope with node mobility and error-prone nature of the wireless medium. Finally, it will conclude with a brief overview of other related issues including emerging wireless services and wireless security.

Format: Most topics in this course will be covered through readings assigned, many of which will be technical papers. In each class I will lead a discussion on one or two papers. In order to have a discussion, students will be expected to have read one assigned paper prior to each class.

Projects: Each student in the class will be expected to do a project. In the first two classes I will discuss a number of possible projects. However, students are encouraged to define their own ideas for projects. Projects can be a system design and implementation, evaluation of an idea through simulations, or even a survey of a sub-topic. (The survey should include an evaluation component). For each project, a student should submit a written project plan, a summary at the end of the semester and an oral presentation on the project.

The projects are expected to be exploratory in nature and therefore I intend to meet with each student group involved in a project quite frequently.

Some of the projects will focus on mobile phone platforms. There are 3 different platforms that are available: Android, iPhone SDK, and Windows Mobile. Please let me know if that interests you.

Assignments

Mobile phone programming resources

Lectures

Meeting frequency: Early in the semester the class will meet thrice a week. This will help you see some initial material relevant for course projects. However, towards the latter part of the semester we will meet only once a week, especially to give you more time to work on your projects. Averaged over the entire semester, the class will have met twice a week (total meeting time over the entire semester will be no different from other usual courses).

Reading assignments: For each class, I will assign at most one paper that you will be required to have read prior to the class. This is mandatory for each student. A part of your course grade will depend on participation in class discussions. Therefore, please make sure that you keep up with the readings.

Reading groups: To help yourself prepare for each class, you should form reading groups of 3-4 members each. The goal of the reading group would be to meet prior to class and discuss the paper assigned for the corresponding class meeting.

Lecture schedule: The lecture schedule is going to be posted in the piazza page for the class.